"I can't say I think Mother genuinely loved us. Toward the end of her life, I was a success in her eyes, and perhaps that is what she loved. Yet, with all her complexity, I felt closer throughout my early childhood to my mother than to the very distant and rather difficult figure of my father. I liked him, but always from a distance. Actually, he delighted in children and was rather jolly with us, but a little awkward. At most, he would take one of us as a small child onto his lap and dangle a watch at our ear. When Ruth and I were very young, he would come into our bedroom before breakfast for a short period of roughhouse play.

"But though he lacked the gift of intimacy, in many ways his supportive love still came through to me. He somehow conveyed his belief in...